DEATH TANK Posted by Dan Pearson on Feb 25, 2009 19:10 (Feb 25, 2009 19:10) |
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Death Tanks rolled out of obscurity as a built in game to an old Sega Saturn title and now it also inevitably makes its own way onto Xbox Live, but was it worth bringing back?
Death Tanks is a HD update of classic title, the game can best be described as a mix between Worms and Tanks in that you have to work out the correct trajectory and velocity of shots to hit the enemy. In each round you are dropped into a battlefield which is the length of the screen. The levels look good in lush HD and the landscapes include areas like mountains, ice mountains and sand mountains, each of which you can blow chunks out of during battle. The action kicks off straight away so you need to act fast. If you have the basic tank you can slowly move left and right and aim using the LS, an arrow on your tank will charge up and once green this means you are ready to fire, a bit of skill is required here as you need to tinker with both trajectory and power of the shot, miss and you will need to fine-tune whilst recharging the shot again.
Once the victor remains you will be taken to the shop where you can upgrade and purchase better fire power, some items aid such as the cursor which can be acquired and shows you in which direction your shot is going, faster tanks or jets that can fly you to safer territory are also available in the shop. Of course the game wouldn’t be fun without some hardcore weapons, so it’s good that items such as machine guns, an automatic turret, rolling mines, guided missiles and a good old fashioned nuke are all there to be had. The game engine surprisingly handles all of the explosions and smoke trails dealt out by the weapons mentioned with ease.
 When playing online you can select from small, large and huge games which equates to 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3 and 4 vs 4, it is exactly the same as single player but with real opponents, you can try to talk to your team mates and get a plan of action going but by the time the game has started half of you are already dead. Game selection is very simple but the lobby is a real mess, if you want to play an 8 player game you have to wait until the 8th person shows up or you could be waiting a long time, once you do get a game going, as soon as someone drops out (which will happen a lot) there is no auto balance so the team with less players will get throttled round after round until they all quit.
Death Tanks is essentially a mad version of Worms, but there is a reason why games of this nature tend to be turn based, the action is so frantic that it is down to complete luck whether you survive rather than skill. Add to that the horrible way in which you select each of your weapons and the poor online lobby and it all add’s up to this being a game that I cannot recommend.
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